This bundle includes four 25g bags of Qianjiazhai tea and a full 100g cake for 200g total (40 sessions). The Zhenyuan Dongsa Cooperative of Qianjiazhai is a loose-knit coalition of families across the remote mountaintops of China’s oldest tea forests dedicated to sustainable stewardship of the wild tea plants, and careful foraging from trees that can be over a thousand years old.
Master Zhou founded the cooperative to refine the finishing craft and picking techniques across Qianjiazhai and bring more well-deserved respect to one of China’s most important but also most unknown tea regions. This tasting kit is an introduction to the incredible diversity of flavor, texture, aroma and aftertaste that wild-foraging in an ancient tea forest can bring.
In this kit you’ll taste the careful heat-free sun dry craft of Qianjiazhai’s sheng pu’er and the fermentation of their shu pu’er, while also tasting the rare near-tea relative camellia crassicolumna, naturally caffeine-free and incredibly intense and aromatic. This kit is an invitation into a little-seen side of tea and its ancient wild origins.
This bundle includes four 25g bags of Crassicolumna tea for 100g total (20 sessions). Crassicolumna is an ancient, wild near-tea relative to the modern camellia sinensis plant, native to the tea forests of Qianjiazhai deep in the mountains. Naturally caffeine-free, Crassicolumna is packed with captivating deep spiced flavor and texture. It has the complexity of pu’er, but a wild flavor all its own.
This tea is wild-foraged by the Li Family of the Dongsa Cooperative within the Mt Ailao National Forest Preserve. The silvery buds and twisting golden leaves are picked from ancient tea trees between one hundred and eight hundred years old scattered between other evergreens, and wildflowers on the rocky mountainside. This incredibly labor-intensive tea to harvest is actually allowed to sun-roast and oxidize without applying heat in a wok. Because more moisture is retained in the leaf, this black tea is a fantastic candidate for aging like traditional sheng pu’er. Only a high-elevation remote place like Qianjiazhai can count on enough sunlight in the spring for this old but rare finishing technique. The result is a tea with the sweet malt of a black tea but the staggering complexity and herbaceous undertones of a sheng pu’er. The loose Maocha is lightly steamed and then meticulously rolled and shaped one pearl at a time by Master Zhou without the use of molds or machinery to preserve the delicate complexity of the tea.
The Li Family and other members of the Dongsa Cooperative sustainably forage from towering crassicolumna trees to harvest the early spring woody buds that make this new black tea. Camellia Crassicolumna (厚轴茶) is a wild near-relative of tea native to Qianjiazhai; because this plant currently a protected species. one of the cooperative's responsibilities is to protect these trees from poaching. The incredibly-sweet. flavor-packed buds are traditionally piled and allowed to oxidize fully in the Mt. Ailao sun without heat treatment, locking in the natural flavor and aroma of the region. Crassicolumna is naturally caffeine-free and rich in antioxidants.
This bundle includes four 25g bags of Qianjiazhai tea and a full 100g cake for 200g total (40 sessions). The Zhenyuan Dongsa Cooperative of Qianjiazhai is a loose-knit coalition of families across the remote mountaintops of China’s oldest tea forests dedicated to sustainable stewardship of the wild tea plants, and careful foraging from trees that can be over a thousand years old.
Master Zhou founded the cooperative to refine the finishing craft and picking techniques across Qianjiazhai and bring more well-deserved respect to one of China’s most important but also most unknown tea regions. This tasting kit is an introduction to the incredible diversity of flavor, texture, aroma and aftertaste that wild-foraging in an ancient tea forest can bring.
In this kit you’ll taste the careful heat-free sun dry craft of Qianjiazhai’s sheng pu’er and the fermentation of their shu pu’er, while also tasting the rare near-tea relative camellia crassicolumna, naturally caffeine-free and incredibly intense and aromatic. This kit is an invitation into a little-seen side of tea and its ancient wild origins.
Qianjiazhai Gong Ting Shu Pu'er is still a very new practice, made only by one of Master Zhou's students in the cooperative. Using the giant buds of Qianjiazhai's wild trees between 100 and three hundred years of age, this tea is carefully and slowly pile fermented to bring out a deep rich sweetness unlike any other shu pu'er out there. Master Zhou was so excited by this experiment he is sharing the technique across the cooperative and encourage more members to keep developing the craft.
The Cooperative's first-ever shu pu’er dragon pearl pressing, this tea is made with beautiful little 2014 buds, allowed to ferment slowly under natural moisture conditions for a sweet and clean flavor profile that shows off the herbaceous side of Qianjaizhai. The loosely pressed. dragon pearls are compact enough for long-term aging and small enough to allow for single brew sessions without having to break apart a bigger cake of tea. The loose hand-twisted compression allows for better and more even aging than anything a machine could achieve.
The cooperative’s sweet, dessert like Yi Ji Shu is given even more sweet rich complexity with the addition of tea flowers. Yi Ji or “top grade” is a buddy harvest from 2014 that the cooperative has been carefully aging for almost a decade now. The 2014 harvest was their first experiment with shu pu’er, done completely naturally without the addition of moisture beyond what was in the fresh tea leaves. The warmth and moisture kickstarted the aging while preserving an incredibly clean flavor that has room to get even deeper now that it is pressed with tea flowers.
Qianjiazhai Gong Ting Shu Pu'er is still a very new practice, made only by one of Master Zhou's students in the cooperative. Using the giant buds of QIanjiazhai's wild trees between 100 and three hundred years of age, this tea is carefully and slowly pile fermented to bring out a deep rich sweetness.
This new blend of 2014 gong ting shu pu'er and Autumn 2020 tea flowers was pressed in the cooperative's small 100g cake stone mold. This is the first time Master Zhou has pressed tea flowers with Gong Ting Shu in a cake, and the result is a beautiful visual contrast. The floral boost to the textural complexity and nuance of this budset shu pu’er is a welcome addition. The clean natural fermentation preserves the herbaceousness of the tea, and the florals bring it out even further.
This bundle includes four 25g bags of Qianjiazhai tea and a full 100g cake for 200g total (40 sessions). The Zhenyuan Dongsa Cooperative of Qianjiazhai is a loose-knit coalition of families across the remote mountaintops of China’s oldest tea forests dedicated to sustainable stewardship of the wild tea plants, and careful foraging from trees that can be over a thousand years old.
Master Zhou founded the cooperative to refine the finishing craft and picking techniques across Qianjiazhai and bring more well-deserved respect to one of China’s most important but also most unknown tea regions. This tasting kit is an introduction to the incredible diversity of flavor, texture, aroma and aftertaste that wild-foraging in an ancient tea forest can bring.
In this kit you’ll taste the careful heat-free sun dry craft of Qianjiazhai’s sheng pu’er and the fermentation of their shu pu’er, while also tasting the rare near-tea relative camellia crassicolumna, naturally caffeine-free and incredibly intense and aromatic. This kit is an invitation into a little-seen side of tea and its ancient wild origins.
This 2022 Zun harvest is offered both loose leaf (25g) and in two pressings: 100g cakes and 250g Xiao Jin Gua. Zun, a designation chosen by the cooperative, means ‘reverence’ of the ancient Qianjiazhai tea trees themselves, an awareness of the human collaboration with a living tree that has existed for generations before us and hopefully will continue to exist for generations after us. The Zun series cakes use the first early spring growth from only the old-growth (500-1000 year) wild trees above the Li Family’s home high in the mountains, and accessible only on foot. The wild nature of this tea’s provenance come through as a flavor texture and aroma experience that is both reverent of its source, and worthy of reverence for its commanding beauty, full of honey and dried apricot with a hint of wild mountain tulsi, and intense textural depth.
Zun, or ‘revered’ is the name the Li Family of the Zhenyuan Dongsa Cooperative gives to the tea picked from their tea trees aged between 300 and 800 years old. This name is a reminder to them of the value of these old trees and of the respect that humans should pay to a living thing that has persisted for so long. Their sustainable foraging lets the trees continue to grow for future genertations to enjoy. The Dragon Pearl pressing of their 2022 Zun sheng pu’er is full of fruit and cooling camphor, and steeps out consistently as the ball unfurls over time.
Gu Hua is Master Zhou’s favorite tea harvest, a small picking from 100 to about 400 year old tea trees that the cooperative does in early autumn as the weather shifts and the nights are cool again. This tea is rich, fruity, juicy and incredibly sweet. It almost drinks like jasmine tea! The tea flowers add a texture and honeyed sweetness. The tea itself was pressed into a cake in an old-school carved stone mold, weighted with a block. No hydraulic press used here! This means looser compression for even and beautiful aging.
The Harmony Series debuted in 2016 as a collaboration between Master Zhou and the Li Family in Qianjiazhai to select tea from a wide range of trees to get a cross section of flavor texture and aroma that they feel most defines the region. These 2022 pressings exemplifies balance, full engagement of the pallet and beautifully creamy texture. Master Zhou blends Gu Hua harvest picking from trees between one hundred and three hundred years of age with older five hundred to a thousand year trees to get the thick powerful flavor and juicy quality of the younger leaf, bolstered by the woody texture, tingling mouthfeel and cooling sensation of the older trees. The result is singular, an opportunity to taste the best of everything Qianjiazhai has to offer.